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Overview

Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, in Washington, DC. His research interests include the political economy and foreign policies of Russia and the former Soviet states; European and Eurasian regional security; and US-Russia deterrence, strategic stability and arms control.

From November 2012 until April 2017, Charap was the Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Prior to joining the IISS, he served at the U.S. Department of State as Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security and on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff, covering Russia and Eurasia. From 2009-2011, Charap was Director for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for American Progress.

Charap's book on the Ukraine crisis, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (co-authored with Timothy J. Colton), was published in January 2017. His articles have appeared in The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Survival, Current History and several other journals.

Charap was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center and the International Center for Policy Studies (Kyiv), and a Fulbright Scholar at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He is fluent in Russian and proficient in Ukrainian. Charap holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.Phil. in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He received his B.A. in Russian and Political Science from Amherst College.

Honors & Awards

Commentary

The Ukraine conflict has left every major actor involved worse off than it was before, and a resolution seems as elusive as ever. An inclusive dialogue on the regional order could be the first step toward defusing the conflict.

Quoted

Ultimately, Russia is unlikely to exercise self-restraint absent some form of an agreement. The only other tools we have are to harden our own defenses or threaten a major retaliation, two options that won't likely be sufficient.

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